A Few Fragments on Machines

Gerald Raunig

Aileen Derieg (translation)

languages

transversal

"In the history of philosophy the
problem of the machine is generally considered a secondary component of a more
general question, that of the techne, the techniques. Here I would like to
propose a reversal of the view in which the problem of technique is a part of a
much more extensive machine issue. This 'machine' is open to the outside and
its machinic environment and maintains all kinds of relationships to social
components and individual subjectivities. It is hence a matter of expanding the
concept of the technological machine into one of the machinic
assemblage..."[1]

Félix Guattari describes here in a few
words the extent of one of the main and frequently misunderstood concepts of
his heterogeneous theory production. Like many terms from the Guattarian
concept forge, the machine is quite intentionally far removed from everyday
language. In theory reception, this practice of bending and inventing terms led
to widespread, polemic attacks on Guattari and his colleague Gilles Deleuze as
"hippies"[2]. Yet the
reinterpretation of the machine concept is not so new and radical as to be
attributed solely to the French poststructuralists. Even at the time of the
final expansion of the industrial revolution throughout Europe, a clear
movement in the direction of Guattari's extended machine concepts can be found in Karl Marx' Grundrisse
der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, drafted in 1857/58, in the
"Fragment on Machines"[3].

In this section of the Grundrisse Marx developed his ideas on
the transformation of the means of labor from a simple tool (which Guattari
later called a proto-machine) into a form corresponding to capital fixe, in other words into technical machines and
"machinery". In addition to the central concept of the machine, to
which Marx was later to devote considerably more attention in Capital, here a second concept is
treated on the side, which had a greater impact on further post-Marxist theory
currents. The concept of the General Intellect, which Marx introduced in the Fragment on Machines as a
secondary concept, was the explicit starting point for the Italian (post-)
Operaists' ideas on mass intellectuality and immaterial labor.[4]
The mutual references between French poststructuralism and Italian
post-Operaism are generally just as manifold as the ways both currents refer to
Marx and distance themselves from him, however the concrete
relation between the two aspects of the small Marx fragment (machine – General
Intellect) got lost on both sides.[5]

Marx on Machines

In general, Marx sees the machine
succinctly as a "means for producing surplus-value"[6],
in other words certainly not intended to reduce the labor effort of the
workers, but rather to optimize their exploitation. Marx describes this
function of "machinery" in Chapter 13 of Das Kapital with the three aspects of entending human labor power (especially women's and child labor), prolonging the
working day and intensifying labor. Yet the machine also appears as an ever new
effect of ever new workers' strikes and protests, as capital confronts them not
only with direct repression, but especially with new machines.[7]

In the "Fragment on Machines"
Marx especially addresses the negative aspects of a historical development, at
the end of which the machine, unlike the tool, is not at all to be understood
as a means of labor for the individual worker: instead it encloses the
knowledge and skill of workers and scholars as objectified knowledge and skill,
opposing the scattered workers as a dominant power. According to Marx, the
division of labor is specifically the precondition for the rise of machines. It
was only after human labour became
increasingly mechanical, mechanized, that the condition was created for these
mechanical tasks of the workers to be taken over in a further step by machines:
"But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of
labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine,
or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery:
the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and
alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a
moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous
mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast
merely as its conscious linkages."[8]

This passage from Marx indicates that the
machine itself, in the final stage of the development of the means of labor,
not only structuralizes and striates the workers as automaton, as apparatus, as
structure, but it is also simultaneously permeated by mechanical and
intellectual organs, through which it is successively further developed and renewed.

On the one hand Marx here formulates the
workers' alienation from their means of labor, how they are (externally)
determined by the machines, the domination of living labor by objectified
labor, and he introduces the figure of the inverted relationship of man and
machine: "The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of
activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the
machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs
of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton,
does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through
the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself."[9]
The inversion of the relationship between workers and means of work in the
direction of the domination of the machine over the human being is defined here
not only by the hierarchy of the labor process, but is also understood as an
inversion of the disposal of knowledge. Through the process of the objectification
of knowledge forms in the machine, the producers of this knowledge lose
undivided competence and power over the labor process. Labor itself appears as
separated, scattered among many points of the mechanical system in single,
living workers. "In machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him
[the worker]; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified
labour."[10]

Even for Marx in the Fragment on
Machines, however, the huge, self-active machine is more than a technical mechanism.
The machine does not appear here limited to its technical aspects, but rather
as a mechanical-intellectual-social assemblage: although technology and
knowledge (as machine) have a one-sided effect on the workers, the machine is
not only a concatenation of technology and knowledge, of mechanical and
intellectual organs, but additionally also of social organs, to the extent that
it coordinates the scattered workers.

Hence the collectivity of the human
intellect is ultimately also evident in the machine. Machines "are organs
of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge,
objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general
social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what
degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come
under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance
with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not
only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice,
of the real life process."[11]
I will come back to the significance of the General Intellect later, but at
this point the aspect should be emphasized that productive force not only
corresponds to new technical machines, not even only to the concatenation of
"mechanical and intellectual organs", but also and especially to the
relationship of the producers to one another and to the production process. Not
only the inside of the technical machine is permeated by mechanical and
intellectual lines, but social linkages and relationships are also evident on
the outside, which become components of the machine. The Fragment on Machines
not only points to the fact that knowledge and skill are accumulated and
absorbed in fixed capital as "general productive forces of the social
brain"[12] and that
the process of turning production into knowledge is a tendency of capital, but
also indicates the inversion of this tendency: the concatenation of knowledge
and technology is not exhausted in fixed capital, but also refers beyond the
technical machine and the knowledge objectified in it to social cooperation and
communication.

Building upon early attempts at mass
staging, biomechanics and constructivist stage mechanization by Vsevolod
Meyerhold, in the Moscow First Workers Theater Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei
Tretyakov developed the "eccentric theater" and the "montage of
attractions" between 1921 and 1924, from which separate versions of
production art strategies later emerged in film, theory and operative
literature. In the Soviet Union in the early 1920s the inclusion of elements
from circus, revue and film still signaled an attack on the pure practice of
bourgeois theater, carried out especially by means of the
"attraction". The "Theater of Attractions" involved
aggressive and physical moments of theater, the effects of which were intended
to disrupt the mechanism of illusion and empathy. At the same time, the montage
of attractions did not signify an accumulation of tricks and artifices designed
for effect, but rather the further development of circus and vaudeville
elements for a materialist, "natural science" theater. What the
Proletkult theater took over from the circus was the approach of the artiste,
but also the fragmentation of its structure of numbers, the sequencing of
"individual attractions not conjoined by a subject matter"[14]:
with Eisenstein and Tretyakov, this apparent deficiency of disconnectedness
became a weapon against empathy. To counter the totality of the subject matter
they mounted and molecularized the piece as a piecework of single attractions.
Eisenstein wrote: "I define an attraction in the formal sense as an
independent and primary element of the construction of a performance – as the
molecular (i.e. constitutive) unity of the impact of theater and of the theater
in general."[15]
The attraction is thus more than just a circus number, it is a situation that,
as a molecular unit, contains conflicts. Eisenstein and Tretyakov's intention
was to create a collision with the audience.

The Theater of Attractions did not
conceal this assault on the audience as the "main material of the
theater"[16]. Contrary
to the theater illusion inviting the audience to take part in an experience in
a pseudo-participatory manner, the Theater of Attractions sought to establish a
process of fragmented excitement. The aspect of montage did not determine the
macrostructure of the piecework here, but was instead applied to the
composition of the individual attractions. "The actors, the things, the
sounds are nothing other than elements, from which an attraction is
constructed"[17]:
an interweaving of actors, who do not portray, but work – and of things,
constructive frameworks and objects that the actors work with instead of
decorations and props.[18]
"The illusory action of the theater is regarded as an inherently coherent
manifestation; what we have here, however, is a conscious expectation of
incompleteness and of major activity on the part of the viewer, who must be able
to orient himself to the most diverse manifestations that are played out before
him."[19]

In his writings on the Theater of
Attractions Tretyakov indicates the direction that the relationship of
human-machines, technical machines and social machines should take: "The
work on the scenic material, the transformation of the stage into a machine
that helps to develop the work of the actor as broadly and diversely as
possible, is socially justified if this machine not only moves its pistons and
holds up to a certain workload, but also begins to carry out certain useful
work and serve the ongoing tasks of our revolutionary era."[20]
Above and beyond the aestheticizing use of technical machines and constructions
as decoration, attempts were undertaken to make the stage machinery of the
theater transparent as a model for technicization and to create flowing
transitions between technical machines and the constructive scaffolding and
stage sets. Beyond Meyerhold's biomechanics, which trained rigid
self-discipline of the human body as a machine, but easily deteriorated into
danced sculpture, the actors and actresses became elements of the attraction.
And finally, Taylorist ideas of the scientific administration of work and the
reversal of the man-machine relationship led to the development of a
concatenation of technical machines (the things), the bodies of the performers
and the social organization of all participants, including the audience. These
ideas of the interlocking of technical and social structures in the Theater of
Attractions only remain superficially bound to a "theater of the
scientific age". The attempt to also "calculate" machines this
complex, as proposed by Eisenstein and Tretyakov, goes beyond a relationship of
the exteriority of technical machines and social collectives and beyond purely
mathematical, technical considerations.

Eisenstein described the attraction as
being based solely on something relative, on the reaction of the viewers. The
representation of a given situation, due to the subject matter, and its
development and resolution through collisions that are logically connected with
this situation, subordinated to the psychologism of the subject matter, is
replaced by the free montage of attractions, which are mounted to achieve a
certain final effect and thus carry out a work on the audience. Eisenstein and
Tretyakov wanted to change the order of emotions, to organize them differently.
The audience was to become part of the machine that they called the Theater of
Attractions. Through "experimental testing" and "mathematical
calculation", they wanted to produce "certain emotional shocks"
among the audience[21].

The emphasis here is on certain emotional shocks: contrary to
the total management of emotions in bourgeois theater, this meant an excitement
determined by utility and precisely demarcated by exactly mounted impulses.
This attempt to "exactly calculate" emotions was the attempt,
contrary to the bourgeois strategy of aesthetic fiction, to steer and test the
cited reality of signs, the body work of the performers and the bodies of the
audience in their interplay. However, a clear distinction must be made between
the means of the old theater model and that of the new. Although the theater
performance was not explicitly defined as a "process of working on the
audience with the means of the theater effect"[22]
in bourgeois theater jargon, the intention of "aesthetic education"
implicitly had a similar effect. The Theater of Attractions, however, sought to
calculate its audience. This also
meant that "the attractions are calculated depending on the audience"[23].
In other words, every performance required new considerations, in fact the
performance found its purpose in the audience, its material in the context of
the life of the audience. It is not known how far Eisenstein and Tretyakov took
their calculation experiments; surveys were taken among the viewers, their
reactions meticulously observed and the results carefully evaluated. The fact
that their calculations had to/were intended to take a considerable goal-consequences
difference into consideration, certainly a far greater uncontrollability than
the performance practices of the 19th century, was due not only to the audience
classes newly won for the theater, but also to the experimental format of the
attraction.

The performances of Tretyakov's Moscow, Do You Hear Me? must have been a
pinnacle in this context, resulting in partly tumultuous situations in the
theater.[24] Written,
organized and produced extremely quickly as a mobilization and agitation play
for a possible German revolution following the Hamburg revolt in late October
1923, it premiered on the sixth anniversary of the October Revolution on 7
November 1923. From a superficial perspective Eisenstein and Tretyakov's play
failed at two levels: at one level, it failed on account of the occasion, since
the revolution, as we know, did not take place. At another level, its
self-reflexive theme, inciting a revolution through art, also holds the entire
problematic issue of overestimating artistic practice. The revolution was to be
set off not solely by the representation of situations, but by converting the
situation through intervention and the abrupt transformation of the bourgeois
theater into a revolutionary theater. Just in the specific performance context
of the socialist society in Moscow, however, this representation of revolution
was to have a different impact than in a revolutionary situation. Tretyakov and
Eisenstein made use of the increasingly mounted attractions with an
accentuation such that more and more excitement spread through the audience:
more and more frequent heckling, viewers reaching for weapons and fist fights
with extras getting involved in play fights must have resulted in an impressive
chaos. And the inflamed viewers were reported to have reacted heatedly not only
in the theater, but also in the streets of Moscow afterward: "[...] after
that they moved through the streets, wildly beating against shop windows and
singing songs."[25]

The question can probably not be answered
as to what extent the Theater of Attractions intended to "calculate"
with the spontaneity described above outside the space of the theater as well.
The calculation of the audience may
well have gone so far as to seek to plan for, calculate and evaluate even chaos
and tumult. With their demands for exact definitions of social tasks and
scientific methods, Eisenstein and Tretyakov certainly succeeded in shifting
the theater machine to a terrain so unstable that no other artistic practice
would soon be able to match it.

Re-Inventing the Machine

In the "Appendix" to Anti-Oedipus Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari not only develop a "Programmatic Balance for Wish Machines"[26],
but also write, in contrast to Marx' ideas on machinery[27],
their own machine concept. What this involves is an expansion or renewal of the
concept, but not at all a metaphorizing of the machine. Deleuze and Guattari do
not establish a "figurative sense" of the machine, but instead
attempt to newly invent the term at a critical distance from both the everyday
sense and Marxist scholars: "We do not presuppose the metaphorical use of
the word machine, but rather an (indistinct) hypothesis about its origins: the
way in which arbitrary elements are made to be machines through recursion and communication."[28]

Marx' machine theory is introduced here
with the cipher "that classical schema" and only explicitly named in
the third and final part of the appendix.[29]
Whereas Marx, in the thirteenth chapter of Das
Kapital, addresses the question at some length of "how the instruments
of labour are converted from tools into machines, or what is the difference
between a machine and the implements of a handicraft"[30],
Deleuze/Guattari find particularly the linear conception of the first question
insufficient in many respects. What they question here is less the immanent
logic of the transformation of the machine as described by Marx, but rather the
framework that Marx presupposes as the basis of this logic: a dimension of man
and nature that all social forms have in common. The linear development from
tool (as an extension of the human being to relieve strain) toward an upheaval,
in the course of which the machine ultimately becomes independent of the human
being, so to speak, simultaneously determines the machine as one aspect in a mechanical
series. This kind of schema, "stemming from the humanist spirit and
abstract", especially isolates the productive forces from the social
conditions of their application.

Imagined beyond this evolutive schema,
the machine is no longer only a function in a series imagined as starting from
the tool, which occurs at a certain point. Similar to the way the techne
concept of antiquity already meant both material object and practice, the
machine is also not solely an instrument of work, in which social knowledge is
absorbed and enclosed. Instead it opens up in respectively different social
contexts to different concatenations, connections and couplings: "There is
no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one
within the other and couples the machines together."[31]

Instead of placing tool and machine in a
series, Deleuze and Guattari seek a more subtle differentiation, and in this
way their query corresponds to Marx' second question about the distinction
between machine and tool. Indeed, this distinction could be explained in the
form of a different genealogy than the one followed by Marx, such as one that
refers to the pre-modern understanding of the "machina", in which the
separation between the organic and the mechanical was irrelevant. In Anti-Oedipus, however, this difference
is treated conceptually/theoretically: the machine is a communication factor,
the tool – at least in its non-machinic form – is, on the other hand, a
communication-less extension or prosthesis. Conversely, the concrete tool in
its use for exchange/connection with the human being is always more machine
than the technical machine imagined in isolation: "Becoming a piece with
something else means something fundamentally different from extending oneself,
projecting oneself or being replaced."[32]

By distinguishing the machine from
something that simply extends or replaces the human being Deleuze and Guattari
not only refuse to affirm the conventional figure of the machine's domination
over the human being. They also posit a difference from an all too simplistic
and optimistic celebration of a certain form of machine, which from Futurism to
cyber-fans is in danger of overlooking the social aspect in ever new
combinations of "man-machine".[33]
The narrative of the human being's adaptation to the machine, the replacement
of the human by the machine misses the machinic, according to Deleuze/Guattari,
not only in its critical, Marxist articulation, but also in its euphoric
tendency. "It is no longer a matter of confronting man and machine to
estimate possible or impossible correspondences, extensions and substitutions
of the one or the other, but rather of conjoining the two and showing how man
becomes a piece with the machine or with other things in order to constitute a
machine."[34] The
"other things" may be animals, tools, other people, statements, signs
or wishes, but they only become machine in a process of exchange, not in the
paradigm of substitution.

Consider the fable from The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien, in
which the Irish author presents precise calculations of the point in time when,
due to the flowing of molecules, people on bicycles turn into bicycles and
bicycles into people and in which percentage – with all the problems resulting
from this, such as people falling over if they are not leaning against a wall
and bicycles assuming human features. For an investigation of the machine here,
it is specifically not a question of changing quantities of identity on both
parts (20% bicycle, 80% human or – even more alarming – 60% bicycle, 40%
human), but rather of the exchange and the flux of machinic singularities and
their concatenation with other social machines: "On the contrary, we think
that the machine must be grasped in an immediate relation to a social body and
not at all to a human biological organism. Given this, it is no longer
appropriate to judge the machine as a new segment that, with its starting point
in the abstract human being in keeping with this development, follows the tool.
For human being and tool are already machine parts on the full body of the
respective society. The machine is initially a social machine, constituted by
the machine-generating instance of a full body and by human being and tools,
which are, to the extent that they are distributed on this body,
machinized."[35]
Deleuze and Guattari thus shift the perspective from the question of the form
in which the machine follows the simpler tool, how human beings and tools are
machinized, to that of which social machines make the emergence of specific,
technical, affective, cognitive, semiotic machines and their concatenations
possible and simultaneously necessary.

The main feature of the machine is the
flowing of its components: every extension or substitution would be
communication-lessness, and the quality of the machine is exactly the opposite,
namely that of communication, of exchange, of openness. Contrary to the
structure, to the state apparatus, which tend toward closure, the machinic
tends toward permanent opening. From the text "Machine and
Structure", written in 1969, to "Machinic Heterogenesis",
published in 1992, Guattari repeatedly pointed out the different quality of
machine and structure, machine and state apparatus[36]:
"The machine has something more than the structure"[37]
It is not limited to managing and striating entities closed off to one another,
but opens up to other machines and moves with their machinic assemblages. It
consists of machines and penetrates several structures simultaneously. It
depends on external elements in order to be able to exist at all. It implies a
complementarity not only with the human being that fabricates it, allows it to
function or destroys it, but also by itself in a relationship of alterity with
other virtual or actual machines.[38]

In addition to this theoretical approach
to a simultaneously indifferent and ambivalent machine concept in L’ Anti-Oedipe
and several older and more recent texts by Guattari, however, it is important
not to omit the historical context of a normative turn to the machinic. Guattari
had already started to develop his machine concept in the late 1960s,
specifically against the political background of leftist experiments in
organizing. These endeavors were initially directed against the hard
segmentarity of Real-Socialist and Euro-communist state left-wings, were
further explored on the basis of the experiences of diverse subcultural and
micropolitical practices, in Guattari's case especially on the basis of
anti-psychiatric practice, and ultimately flowed, even after 1968, into efforts
to resist and reflect on the structuralization and closure of the 1968
generation in cadres, factions and circles.

The problem that Guattari deals with in
his first machine text, written briefly after the experience of 1968, is the
problem of a lasting revolutionary organization: "the problem of
establishing an institutional machine distinguished by a special axiomatic and
a special practice; what is meant is the guarantee that it does not close
itself off in the various social structures, especially not in the state
structure, which seems to form the cornerstone of dominant production
conditions, although it no longer corresponds to the means of production."[39]
Not only the "dominant production conditions", but also the current
forms of resistance have assumed machinic form; structuralization and closure
as gestures of (self-) protection bypass this fact. Machinic institutions
cannot reproduce the forms of the state apparatus, those provided by the
paradigm of representation, but produce new forms of "instituent
practices": "The revolutionary project as the 'machine activity' of
an institutional subversion would have to uncover these kinds of subjective
possibilities and ensure them ahead of time in every phase of the battle
against being 'structuralized'. Yet this kind of permanent check of the machine
effects that affect the structures could never be satisfied with a 'theoretical
practice'. It requires the development of a specific analytical practice, which
immediately applies to every step of organizing the battle."[40]

General Intellect and the EuroMayday
Machine

Much of what Guattari formulated in his
thoughts on the machine against the background of experiences of May 1968, has
been updated in recent years – perhaps even more so than during the 1960s and
the 1970s – in the forms of non-representationist movements that have become
active against migration and border regimes, economic globalization and the
precarization of work and life.[41]
The latter is the main issue especially of the EuroMayday movement[42],
which started in Milan and has sought to reappropriate May 1st, in particular,
in recent years. Quite similar in this respect to the theater audience
revolutionized and animated by Tretyakov and Eisenstein's play Moscow, Do You Hear Me?", the
EuroMayday activists today also move through the streets, sometimes
"wildly beating against shop windows and singing songs"; specifically
through the streets of meanwhile about twenty European cities, including
London, Copenhagen, Maribor, Barcelona, Hamburg and Vienna.[43]
Sometimes the shop windows are broken, but more often they are painted over,
sprayed and covered with a layer of new signs.[44]
The EuroMayday Parades not only renew the revolutionary traditions of May 1st,
but also oppose the privatization of urban public spheres with their bodies,
images, signs and statements. This kind of reappropriation of the city is
consistently played out without stages and podiums, in the endeavor to counter
the paradigm of representation with the paradigm of the event.

Yet the EuroMayday machine has two
temporalities. Not only that of the event, but also the long duration of
instituent practices, in which the connection between the machine as movement
against structuralization and the machine as "social productive force"
becomes clear. Organizing for May 1st is not the only dimension of the Mayday
activists: even though limited by the wish and time resources of the activists,
throughout the year there are micro-actions and discursive events, regular
communication on mailing lists and meetings in various European cities for
transnational exchange. In addition, an increasingly dense network of
addressing the issue of the precarization of work and life is growing, not only
in Europe.

However, this formation of instituent
practices is only incipiently evident. According to the post-Operaist
philosopher Paolo Virno, the movement has "not yet sufficiently bundled
the forms of battle that are suitable for transforming the situation of
precarious, temporary and atypical work into a subversive political
asset."[45] This kind
of bundling starts less with the old forms of organization by "state
apparatuses" than with the concatenation of machinic forms of movement and
postfordist forms of work and life. In his texts on this theme, especially in
the Grammar of the Multitude, Virno
picks up directly from the Fragment on Machines and the concept, casually
introduced there by Marx, of the General Intellect. Even if social knowledge
was really ever fully absorbed in the technical machines in the era of industrialization,
this would be completely unthinkable in the postfordist context:
"Obviously, this aspect of the 'general intellect' matters, but it is not
everything. We should consider the dimension where the general intellect,
instead of being incarnated (or rather, cast in iron) into the system
of machines, exists as attribute of living labor."[46] As post-Operaist theory formulates, following Guattari, due to the
logic of economic development itself, it is necessary that the machine is not
understood merely as a structure that striates the workers and encloses social
knowledge in itself. Going beyond Marx' idea of knowledge absorbed in fixed
capital, Virno thus posits his thesis of the simultaneously pre-individual and
trans-individual social quality of the intellect: "Living labor in
postfordism has as raw material and means of production: thinking that is
expressed through language, the ability to learn and communicate, the
imagination, in other words the capacity that distinguishes human consciousness.
Living labor accordingly incarnates the General
Intellect (the 'social brain'), which Marx called the 'pillar of production
and wealth'. Today the General Intellect
is no longer absorbed in fixed capital, it no longer represents only the
knowledge contained in the system of the machines, but rather the verbal
cooperation of a multitude of living subjects."[47]

By taking up Marx' term Virno
indicates that "intellect" is not to be understood here as the
exclusive competence of an individual, but rather as a common tie and a
constantly developing foundation of individuation, as a social quality of the
intellect. Here pre-individual human
"nature", which lies in speaking, thinking, communicating, is
augmented by the trans-individual
aspect of the General Intellect: it is not only the entirety of all knowledge
accumulated by the human species, not only what all prior shared capability has
in common, it is also the in-between of cognitive workers, the communicative
interaction, abstraction and self-reflexion of living subjects, the
cooperation, the coordinated action of living labor.

Finally, on the basis of
Virno’s writings we are able to connect General Intellect as a collective
capability and a machine concept in Guattari's sense. Knowledge as collective
intellectuality is complementary to the machinic quality of production and
social movement. General Intellect, or the "public intellect", as
Virno further develops the concept, is another name for Guattari’s expansion of
the machine concept beyond the technical machine and outside its realm:
"Within the contemporary labor process, constellations of concepts exist,
which function as productive 'machines' themselves, without needing a
mechanical body or a little electronic soul."[48]

For
suggestions and critical advice, I would like to thank Martin Birkner, Isabell
Lorey, Birgit Mennel, Stefan Nowotny and Alice Pechriggl.

[4]For a brief outline of the various references from Operaist and
post-Operaist generations to the machine fragment, see: Virno, "Wenn die
Nacht am tiefsten ... Anmerkungen
zum General Intellect"

[5]In Toni Negri's early book "Marx beyond Marx", for
instance, which resulted from his Paris seminar on the Outlines in 1978, there is no discussion of the machine. An
exception here is Maurizio Lazzarato, who continued the idea of both aspects in
his work on immaterial labor on the one hand and video philosophy on the other.

[13]This fragment is an abridged version of the section "Theater
Machines Against Representation. Eisenstein
and Tretyakov in the Gas Works" from Raunig, Kunst und
Revolution, 134-147 / Art
and Revolution

[18]The concatenation of events and of players, things,
sounds and audience, as described here, comes surprisingly close to Guattari's
machine concept. In L’Anti-Oedipe Deleuze and
Guattari mention that in Russian Futurism and Constructivism certain production
circumstances remain, despite collective appropriation, "external to the
machine", yet the practice of the Theater of Attractions seems to
contradict this.

[33]At this point it should be noted that Deleuze and Guattari's use of
the machine concept is consistently indifferent to ambivalent. At the same
time, the dark sides of machinization come up regularly, such as in reflections
on fascist and post-fascist forms of the war machine in A Thousand Plateaus (especially 420-421) or Guattari's concept of
"machinic enslavement" in "worldwide integrated
capitalism", as Guattari called the phenomenon in the early 1980s that is
today framed as globalization. Unlike Marx, here "machinic enslavement"
(Guattari, "Capital as the Integral of Power Formations", 219-222)
does not mean the subordinated relationship of the human being to the technical
machine that objectifies social knowledge, but rather a more general form of
the collective management of knowledge and the necessity of permanent
participation. It is the machinic quality of postfordist capitalism – here
Guattari is close to the theories of neoliberal governmentality developed from
Foucault – that adds a palette of control mechanisms to the traditional systems
of direct repression, which requires the complicity of individuals.

[36]The relevant concept of the state apparatus goes far beyond
conventional concepts of the state; as the opposite of machines state
apparatuses are characterized by structures, striated spaces and hard
segmentarity.

[41]The category of "non-representationist practice" does not
include the Social Forums movement, which has not met its own claims, as
defined in its statutes, of rejecting representation in form and content.

[42]On the issues addressed by this movement (especially the
precarization of work and life), cf. the articles of the eipcp Web Journal
transversal entitled “precariat” http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704/,
particularly Mitropoulos, "Precari-Us?" on the question of terms, as
well as the texts of Lorey and Tsianos/Papadopoulos in this issue
“subjectivities and machines”.